About Me

Staten Island, New York, United States
I've worked in the FDNY for the past 29 years. I've written freelance commentary for the past twenty years and have one book published "Looking Up (A Working View)," Quiet Storm Publishers. For those of you with whom my ideas resonate, we probably share a common love of Liberty. If you like anything you read here, feel free to reuse...just please add my appellation. Life's been more than fair to me and this is a part of my humble offering back. If you have any corrections, or additions, please email me (my email address is in my profile) and I’ll both appreciate and consider them all and do my best to get back to you with my thoughts on it. My ideas are always evolving and I’m open to persuasion in all areas. I thank all those who've taken some of their time to read here.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Recently Bill O’Reilly was instrumental in getting Jet Blue to drop its sponsorship for the Yearly Kos Convention and has highlighted the hypocrisy of many moderate and Liberal, though not far Left, Dems who’re planning to attend the event. Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, who are regularly lambasted in the Kos comments section.

Now Kos is going after O’Reilly....hard.

O’Reilly claims his moderators scrub his board of vile, vulgar comments and personal attacks. Now O'Reilly is charging that some Kossocks are posting comments on his board and claiming they’re from O’Reilly members in an escalating war between the two sides.

Interestingly enough, one Kossock recently attributed the quotes that other Kossocks claimed were from posters on O’Reilly’s board to O’Reilly himself; “Last week, the falafel-loving Bill O'Reilly declared a jihad against "the" Daily Kos, declaring it a hate site on par with the Nazis and the KKK.

"And in keeping with his non-existent journalistic standards, he produced random posts that he mined from the thousands of comments made here everyday...check that. He had had some low-level intern search for examples of hate from the thousands of comments made here everyday and presented them as representative of Daily Kos.

"Well, what's good for the goose is good for the fried balls of spiced fava beans. Here, presented for your consideration, are some deep thoughts from the denizens of billoreillydotcom, and following the logic of Bill O'Reilly, it means that:

"If she wins which hopefully she won't. My guns are loaded for the revolt are yours??"President Hillary Rodham Clinton no way I am keeping my guns loaded if she is elected because there will be a civil war."

Well, all this brought me back to a relatively recent furor involving the far Left and Bill O’Reilly. On June 4th, O’Reilly took the NY Times to task for failing to cover the recently busted “JFK Terror Plot” on page 1, as most news organs around the country had done..A friend of mine emailed me that a website charmingly named oreilly-sucks.com had posted that they'd caught O'Reilly in a lie. I was skeptical when I saw the name of the site, but checked it out and found this;

"6-5-07 -- Last night Bill O'Reilly devoted an entire segment to attacking the NY Times for not covering the arrests made in the JFK airport terrorist plot on the front page...

..."One problem there Billy, the New York Times did cover the JFK terror plot on the front page of its Sunday edition. You wouldn't know it from watching O'Reilly, who chose to show only the top half of the front page. "Now I'm not making this up," he told his viewers. "You see it. This is not the Colbert Report. This is The Factor and this is the fact."

"But his fact is a lie, and he was making it up, he literally made it up, here is what Billy had on the screen." (they showed the front page of the 6-3-07 Sunday NY Times, above the fold)

Well, I still had the Sunday NY Times of 6/3/07 at that time and when I saw that story and guess what?

The NY Times DID NOT cover the story on the front page, below the fold or anywhere else!

Except Bill O'Reilly DID make a technical error. The story was NOT on page A-37, but on A-30.

The folks at oreilly-sucks.com even had a NY Times front page pictured, but it's largely unreadable, though I wouldn't be surprised if they photoshopped the page A-30 article onto their online front page.

Ironically enough, they were undermined by the old "Gray Lady" herself, when the NY Times acknowledged not putting the story on page one and rationalized their reasons for doing so, shortly after this dust up.

Even other NYC newpapers noticed. The NY Post wrote a piece on that curious bit of journalism that went;

GRAY LADY, GRIM AGENDA

"June 5, 2007 -- Terror plot? What terror plot? That's what The New York Times seems to be asking, even as most news outlets are giving front-page coverage to the recently foiled scheme to blow up JFK Airport's fuel pipeline.

"The paper's goal seems to be getting America to lower its guard - which can only lead to disaster.

"The suspects were "Short on Cash / And a Long Way From Realizing Goals," one Times headline insisted yesterday. Regarding two of the men arrested, a second headline asserted that "Neither Seemed an Extremist."

"Indeed, on Sunday the paper barely covered the arrests of three suspects behind the plot: Its main story appeared A-37 pages back. A second piece undermined the significance of that story: "Plot Was Unlikely To Work, Experts Say, Citing Safeguards and Pipeline Structure."

OK, they, like Limbaugh and O'Reilly had the page wrong (A-37), although that makes me wonder whether it was different pages in different editions.But Brian Maloney over at the radioequalizer got it right;

IT WAS ON PAGE A30

"After their assertion was refuted even by the New York Times itself, a nasty attack by liberal bloggers against conservative talk show hosts has backfired.

"After Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and other hosts lambasted the Sunday New York Times for burying news of the JFK terror plot bust, Think Progress, News Hounds and other lefties accused them of lying.

"By claiming the story actually was covered on page one and even asserting that O'Reilly intentionally misled viewers by showing only the top part of the page on camera, these smear sites were truly pulling a fast one.

"While Limbaugh said JFK terrorism plot coverage was found on page A30, O'Reilly says he found it on A37.

After seeing a number of egregious misrepresentations from these sites, I'm convinced they weren't just "pulling a fast one," as Brian said, but were engaged in something far more deliberate and malicious, and very possibly civilly actionable.

That story was my introduction to such "websites" and as I suspected, judging by many of their names, I expected very little and wasn't disappointed.

Suffice to say, if such people would lie about such an obvious and easily provable issue (whether or not the NY Times covered the “JFK Terror Plot” on page A-1 -they did not), then they’d almost certainly lie about ANYthing.

Whether they realize it or not, these bloggers are open to civil litigation and the attorney's I know all seem to feel that that would be a wise course in some of the more egregious cases, as it wouldn't merely stand a real chance of winning damages for the accused, even if it didn't, it would cost the defendant in legal fees.

You can't leave off any qualifiers, or intros when quoting someone, for instance, if O'Reilly said, "While I'm against the death penalty, there are times when I'd support the death penalty for pedophiles and not lethal injection, the very prolonged and painful deaths, their acts warrant," it is civilly actionable to say "That O'Reilly said, 'I'd support the death penalty for pedophiles and not lethal injection, the very prolonged and painful death, their acts warrant.' " The fact that that snippet is in there does not shield that deliberate, egregious and obviously malicious misquote from civil action. In fact, THAT kind of misquote, the kind that changes the entire meaning of what the commentator said is demonstrably and overtly malicious and very probably opens the person doing the misquoting to civil litigation.

When a person misquotes another individually that egregiously and that maliciously the consensus is that that may well reach the level of proving "deliberate, malicious intent" and leave that person liable to substantial civil damages.

Up to this point O'Reilly and others have adhered to the strategy that ignoring these folks is the best possible strategy, as it denies them the attention they seek, but now that he's engaged Kos (over Jet Blue) , that attention is a moot point, so that strategy may no longer be sound.

O'Reilly acknowledges that the U.S. "must confront the Islamic jihadists," well, it's becoming increasingly clear that people like O'Reilly have to confront the Liberal jihadists here at home.

Looks like we're fighting this war on at least three or four fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan, Homeland Security, and The Enemy Within.

How did we reached this treacherous place? I believe, as David Horowitz and others have pointed out, that we've had liberal 'sleeper cells' infiltrating our colleges and universities ever since the sixties, who then sent their mindbots out into the media, the judiciary, etc., and, like termites, are trying to destroy us from within.

I appreciate your thorough and fact-filled work, and I'll be getting back to the subject of deconstructing the sixties very soon on my own site. Unlike you, I can only stomach so much at one time, then I need a break.

I understand Limbaugh and Hannity being ogres to today's Liberals, but O'Reilly holds a number of rather Left-of-center views; anti-death penalty, believes Big Energy is price gouging in the U.S. and that illegal immigration should be dealt with by BOTH providing an immediate pathway to citizenship for those here, coupled with strict border enforcement going forward - trespass and go to jail.

His other "tradionalist stances" include pressing for Jessica's Law across the country, and defending freedom of religion ("the war on Christmas")....Come ON! That's hardly "Conservative" and it's far from the kind of GOP shill that Sean Hannity often is.

Still, that said, this really is WAR. The hard Left cannot stomach the dissenting voices of Talk Radio & FoxNews. I don't see Conservatives looking to shut down MSNBC, the NY Times or nitwits like Olbermann, or the nuts on Air America. The other side can't stand those they disagree with....I can only see this getting uglier and more divisive.

You and David Horowitz are right on the Liberal Sleeper Cells," though I wouldn't even call them "Liberal" so much as radical.

Even the far Left doesn't embrace the term "Liberal," so much as "progressive." They use being called "Liberal" to their advantage as that makes them sound more mainstream - the likes of Moore, Sheehan, Gore and the Soros crew are far Left of Liberal.

Our colleges and newsrooms need a thorough housecleaning and fumigating.

Mick, the liberals were firmly ensconced even before my college days in the late 1960s. The academia has always swung left as conservatives have seemingly preferred business opportunities to teaching. Add to that, the unions (read: schools) and tenure (read: colleges), both of which are anathema to us (and were to me even then!) and there is little wonder as to why there is so much liberality in education.

JMK, what has evolved within the two parties since the 1960s is this:

The conservatives of Goldwater's time broached no infidelity to the litmus tests that they laid out.

And they were slaughtered.

The Dems today have seen fit to ostracize anybody who doesn't pass their litmus test. Witness the idiots tripping over themselves to claim that their votes in 2002 were due to Bush lying to them.

In 1968, Mitt Romney's father George was a very popular figure and considered a frontrunner for the nomination. Then, he tried to claim that his new opposition to the Vietnam war was due to being "brainwashed" (i.e. lied to).

He sank like a stone.

Today, that is considered an expiation and is demanded by the left before they will even consider you for a candidate.

It's the dumbing down of America - courtesy of the Daily KOs, Move-On and the rest of the morons.

I wonder if you saw John Podhoretz' column in yesterday's Post, the one about a possble emerging Liberal majority in America?

The one thing that doesn't worry me is any long-term such trend. Liberal economic policies inevitably lead to ruin and Liberal social policies lead to the vicimization of many thousands of good, decent, hard-working people by predators who are treated as "victims of society" by Liberal social policy.

Liberalism, is, for the most part a self-destructive, self-defeating ideology, that wallows in victimology and sees work as "slavery," and profits as "obscene."

I'd just prefer NOT to go through eight or ten years of that pathway to ruin, only to prove those things to yet another generation.

In some ways though, I feel bad for G W Bush. He's been star-crossed. The invasion and ousting of Saddam Hussein went well and was over in three weeks!

They botched the post-Saddam rebuilding and the American people have (1) have lost patience (why risk American lives & treasure over a democracy no one in that country seems to appreciate or want?) and (2) have largely lost their focus on the WoT, again primarily because the current administration has failed to define the enemy and rationale for the military WoT.

That and their stupifyingly numb position on the borders, which itself undermines their seriousness on the domestic WoT - putting "cheap labor" ABOVE national security, have done severe harm to the Republican chances of staving off a bloodbath in the next election.